some weiwei

"...yes ceramics is kind of crazy. i hate ceramics... but i do it. i think if you hate something too much you have to do it. you have to use that."

"i think poetry is for keeping our intellect in the stage before rationality. it brings us to a pure sense of contact with our feelings. at the same time, of course, it does have a strong literary expression; but the most important thing is that it brings us to the innocent stage in which imagination and language can be most vulnerable and at the same time most penetrating."

"... nothing was planned. the most beautiful thing that ever happened in my life was by coincidence and not by plan. and it often happens because you don't plan. if you have plans, you only have one go. if you don't have plans, it often turns out well because you've followed the situation. that's why i've always jumped into unprepared situations, the most exciting condition."

"... i want the size to be more like the scale of furniture, which can be put in any place. you can't identify it; it's not you're familiar with. it's more like a foreign object because you don't know its usage, but its made to such high quality that you can't ignore its purpose. but its purpose is you don't know. i feel it's very interesting to put a tremendous effort or art or craftsmanship into something useless or even nameless..."

from the penguin paperback: ai weiwei speaks with hans ulrich obrist

when footsteps form islands...

sssssssshhhhhhhh........

dan flavin's nightmare & robert irwin's nightmare

everybody needs a bit of...

when entering the ear protection zone...

various small gradual fires and resonant milk...

i'll be starting my year in hong kong for an upcoming installation at the new run run shaw media building designed by daniel libeskind for the city university of hong kong. the installation is part of a series of exhibitions called "white walls have ears", my installation opens january 12th.

...

Ed Ruscha’s second seminal picture book - Various Small Fires - was self-published in 1964, and is a quintessential early Los Angeles icon. Like Ruscha’s book, I was born in Los Angeles the year it was published.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about this book - not only in relation to my own history; but how each image in the book speaks, evokes, and continues to open up. Because the book contains no text nor explanations, various small fires offers an open experience, with little resolve - a series of generic images of fires and one glass of milk, supposedly from “stock photographs”.

Fire, like sound, has a physical form that is relatively un-graspable and constantly changing. Both can feel ephemeral, quiet, loud, aggressive, beautiful, moving, dangerous, moving, growing, evaporating, smoldering, smoking - and both can influence one’s experience of a landscape.

For me, Ruscha’s book is less a narrative and more a trajectory of encounters; where turning the pages of a small book is akin to wandering through various rooms and corridors of an architecture.

Thus, I have built a series of “small fires” (and one “milk”) of colored plexi-glass and sound, in an attempt to converse with Daniel Libeskind’s design of the recently completed building - each in a different location, so as to allow for unexpected encounters.

The sculptural forms are a kind of “mash-up”, exploiting certain formal characteristics of both the architecture and the photographs towards new architectures and new fires. There has been no attempt to illustrate the forms, as much as allowing these sources to generate analog responses - as if the images in the book and the design of the spaces could be used as scores.

Somehow I keep thinking of fires in relation to Steve Reich’s text “Music as a Gradual Process”.

My own audible fires were built upon a base of field recordings of fires made several years ago in Denmark and California that have been languishing for years in the gargantuan pile of field recordings. Other sounds used include acoustic objects, small electronics, and some instruments. The approach to repetition and evolution over time, attempts to engage Reich’s text as well.

My hope is that these “fire-sites” will offer a site for casual listening, less a destination and more a kind of happening upon... where one might stop to sit near a fire, and get lost in the resonant “flames”. the works seek to create spaces of pause, towards active listening and quiet mediation.

more info: here

first flea market find of the new year...

unbelievably wonderful 8" x 10" photo, probably early 60's, unknown location, unknown photographer, unknown sound of rare beauty emanating from man and black box...

sound in space...

above are images of the backside of a page of original art by vicente alcazar from the 1976 comic mag "space 1999" published by charlton in 1976. the art is from a story called "the infinity mechanism", where the crew manages to kill a robot-alien infiltrator by sending hi-frequencies of sound through the speaker system of the space station.

what is strange and wonderful about the art is that during the proofing of the text, someone cut out the word "sound" and flipped the tiny piece of paper over, so that the letterer could replace the word "sound" with the word "ultrasonic" - which is how the page appears in its published form.

of course i love is this back side, and how the forms of the art-inks bleeding through the paper merge with that solitary word: sound. it is as if the stains and the word were somehow intentionally brought together.

the bubble has landed!

very excited about my friend jeffrey head's new book from princeton architectural press on the bubble houses of wallace neff - no nails, no wood! jeffrey has been working on this project for a long time, and has put a ton of energy into the book, and it is great to see it realized.

neff's experimental domes, built using his patented "airform construction" process, have been vastly ignored by the modern architecture community, so the book will most certainly be a revelation for those that know only neff's spanish styled mansions. while neff was more known during his lifetime for these traditional home designs - many built for movie stars - the architect believed that he would be remembered more for these experimental dome shaped shelters.

the book is filled with rare archival photographs and a ton of information - both historical and technical; charting the various bubble projects in the usa, as well as worldwide. (and yes, our house pictured, and i wrote a tiny preface.)

it should be in bookstores this weekend.

the sound of IKB...

VIII. the blue cries of clarles estienne:

in 1957, i made a short 16mm film about my exhibitions of the blue period. i needed a commentary, preferably spoken by an art critic. so i asked charles estienne if he would willingly shout blue cries for the twenty minute duration of the film. the longest and most voluminous blue cries possible, drawing inspiration from the paintings in my studio at rue campagne premiere. this proved to be very successful and i must say that the film will retain the prestigious commentary that charles courageously pronounced with such profound conviction at the time. these are restrained cries, long enough and vigorously sustained (he requested two weeks for practice before the recording). to give an approximate idea of the cries alone: they are somewhat reminiscent of the cries that sailors shout out at regular intervals in order to avoid collisions in dense fog"

yves klein from: overcoming the problematics of art, the writings of yves klein

this sunday... book signing and performances...

very excited about this event at LACMA's Art Catalgues bookstore with artist stephen prina!

Stephen Prina and Steve Roden at Art Catalogues
Sunday, December 11 | 4 pm

Artists Stephen Prina and Steve Roden join independent curator and writer Laura Fried to discuss the artists' recently published books as well as music, painting, and the potential, process, and principles of translation. Stephen Prina’s multifaceted practice encompasses painting, installation, photography, sound, and film. He has also had an acclaimed career as composer and pop musician. Steve Roden draws on various forms of specific notation—from language to musical scores to maps—and renders them through self-invented systems into new scores, which then take form in his painting, drawing, sculpture, and sound compositions.


The program will begin with a special piano performance by Stephen Prina and a short improvised sound work by Steve Roden.

Free, no reservations; seating is limited

To pre-order books and CDs, please call (323) 857-6587 or email artcatalogues@lacma.org.

new web piece

the kind folks at parallelograms invited me to make a work for their site. if you don't know them, they send an artist 5 or 6 images found on the web and the artist then picks one and makes a work responding to the image... the work is then hosted on their site...

i used an image of the disneyland monorail (see above), and here's a bit of text i sent to the parallelogram-ers:

"weirdly, i got in the mail the day after i decided to go with the monorail image, a box of sheet music from a friend who was going to toss it. the first sheet music i saw as i opened the box was "bridge over troubled water" ... so the film is sort of a mash up of the sheet music and some info on the monorail's history from the disneyland site. some of the images are related to the monorail's path based on the photo you sent, and the rest is all cut ups from the sheet music... nice to make something that one cannot make sense of... but i hope it manages to offer a little poetry along the way."

click here

then click on the monorail picture to see/hear the piece

i would highly recommend snooping out the past projects on the site, particularly my friend stephen vitiello's sound piece which is stellar! but there is lots of goodness...

when trees say goodbye...

in the crazy wild wind of last night, many of the trees here lost large limbs, and some trees were uprooted entirely.

two of the largest branches that fell from the sky landed on the flagstone path, near the front door, and two of the largest that hit the flagstone left marks.

as you can see, these are quite beautiful drawings, certainly not too distant from the japanese calligraphic marks that might've been part of a jisei - japanese death poem, written down or recited in the last minutes before death.

son house

i'll be your mirror...

among the rainniar eht gnoma
and lightssthgil dna
i saw the figure 5 erugif eht was i
in golddlog ni
on a redder a no
fire truckkcurt erif
movinggnivom
tenseesnet
unheededdedeehnu
to gong clangssgnalc gnog ot
siren howlsslwoh neris
and wheels rumblinggnilbmur sleehw dna
through the dark city..ytic krad eht hguorht

william carlos williamssmailliw solrac mailliw

out of context, into mind...

meanwhile, not far away, at the state prison: "i must think harder -
concentrate on my thoughts - make my tentacles obey me!"

new sound installation...

i currently have a new sound installation up at art center's williamson gallery in pasadena. the show runs until january 15. the sound piece was created using recordings i received from JPL, and an old LP of recordings of the ionosphere via tape recorders circa 1955.

the exhibition was curated by stephen nowlin, and contains some wonderful work by semiconductor, michael c mcmillan, rebecca mendez, and others.

you can see images of some of the works in the exhibition, along with my sound on this youtube clip...

more goodness from the pompidou's recent acquisitions

"the japanese painter ryochi shigeta lived in paris from 1958-64, and theni boxton before returning to japan in 1966, and showing tokyo his first investigation on curved and cyindrical surfaces.
in 1969, masaomi unagami director of printing-ink manufacturers dainishi sieka sugested that he continue his researches on the two chimneys of his factory, and ryoichi shigeta thus shifted his focus from the decoration of traditional japanese pottery to industrial architecture. with his monumental motifs and the contrast of complimentary colours - orange and blue - he destructured the volumes of the chimneys. treated in this supergraphic manner, these became color signals in tokyo's industrial landscape."
museum wall label...

when sensibilities are shared...

a few days ago i was lucky enough to visit the pompidou, and they had a whole slew of recent acquisitions on display. as i walked into one of the galleries, i was elated to see several of andre cadere's "round wooden bars" from the mid-1970's. i have always loved these works - both their visual aesthetic as sculpture and the performances he did by carrying these works with him to openings, or placing them in the street, etc. they always seemed perfect to me, but i have seldom found a way to articulate why my response to them has always been so strong.

as i moved from the sculpture, i gravitated towards a painting on the adjacent wall. as you can see from the image, there are a number of consistencies between this painting and a number of my own. when i looked at the wall label to see whose work it might be, i was floored to discover it was an early work of cadere's!!! for i had never seen an image of anything he made before the "round wooden bars" ... and had no idea he began by making abstract paintings! and so, the uncovering of this early work suggested that my deep response to the "round wooden bars" over the last 20 years was not just an awkward coincidence, an interest in the proposition of provocation nor a simple aesthetic response to the minimal nature of the work (something i respond to quite strongly, but have never really been able to negotiate within my own paintings) - but is instead a kind of uncovering of an unspoken shared sensibility.

even the wall text felt relevant to my own work: ... "he was making a kind of op art with folkloric and psychedelic touches... introducing the play of chromatic permutations..."

of course, i am not in any way suggesting that cadere's work and my own are consistent, or that i am somehow contextualizing myself within his stature; but nonetheless, it is a wonderful thing when you find these deeper connections to a work and/or artist you respond to. in discovering this painting as a piece of cadere's beginnings, i begin to feel closer to him, and i acknowledge (as i hope that he would too if he were alive) that there is something clearly shared.

in truth, the painting really just made me happy that one of my heroes feels a little bit closer to my own feeble path...